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Tweak says, "I...LOVE...mother...!!"

kirayoshi1 (kirayoshi1) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-06-08 01:31:00

Entry tags:

char: colossus/piotr rasputin, char: shadowcat/kitty pryde, creator: john cassaday, creator: joss whedon, publisher: marvel comics, series: one perfect moment week, title: astonishing x-men

A Perfect Moment: Kitty and Peter
One of my favorite moments from recent X-books follows under the cut. Semi-NSFW.

This takes place during Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, specifically #21 and #22. Kitty and Piotr have been tap-dancing around their relationship for awhile now, and had actually taken things to the next level, but then had to deal with being mindscrewed by Cassandra Nova and Emma Frost. Now they're on the Breakworld, in a desperate effort to prevent the Breakworld tyrant from destroying the Earth with a ten-mile-long hollow-tipped bullet(I wish to God I wasn't kidding).

While on Breakworld, Kitty decides to stop tap-dancing...

Uh, we'll just leave these two alone and pick this up in the next issue, after the deed is done...

Okay, Marvel. You want my hard earned coin ever again? Get Kitty back! Got it?

(Post a new comment)

	jcbaggee 2009-06-08 03:49 am UTC (link)
	Second to this moment? Her orgasmic phase through the floor. Its hilarity at its finest! (Reply to this) (Thread)

	yaseen101 2009-06-08 04:37 am UTC (link)
	I....must....see....this. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	comicoz 2009-06-08 10:26 am UTC (link)
	Seconded! Where??!? (Reply to this) (Parent)

brilliantnova
2009-06-08 05:35 am UTC (link)

That was a classic moment indeed.
I miss Kitty as well. Funny thing is, I was a lil annoyed by Wheadon's run. It just felt like I walked into the Buffyverse. God I hope I don't get flamed for writing/saying that. But Ehhh I guess more so that its the Wheadon satire and wit.
Though the book seemed to move a lil slow for me. At any rate I alsp would like to see Kitty back in the X-books.
I really have not read X_men consistently since she was written into that space torpedo thinger.
Sucks to Ms Pryde :[

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angelophile
2009-06-08 06:00 am UTC (link)

No, I totally agree. Kitty read more like Buffy than Kitty and while there were plenty of good quips, it never felt like the X-men to me. I've always been particularly bugged by his take on Kitty, which basically seemed to be taking her back to the maturity level he remembered when he was reading the books as a teen but adding sex so he could effectively make love to his favourite character through proxy. It felt rather creepy to me in that respect and it bugged me that Warren Ellis very effectively made Kitty an adult with a sex life whereas Whedon ignored all her maturity growth and made her a teen with a sex life. The "tee hee" moment during the first sex scene made me cringe. In that, it felt like he was writing a sub-par Buffy rather than a well-developed Kitty.

And as for Whedon's plotting... well...

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	suzene 2009-06-08 10:39 am UTC (link)
	I thought that Whedon killing Kitty off after he got to revisit his teenage fanboy years (with the additional bonus of her being old enough to do Colossus this time around) was...kinda creepy, actually. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	angelophile 2009-06-08 10:47 am UTC (link)
	Point. Added discomfort. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	suzene 2009-06-08 06:51 pm UTC (link)
	Apparently the most effective use of a character after she has played out the writer's youthful fantasies of yesteryear is an agonizing and drawn-out torment that might eventually culminate in death. Just a little...um...yeah. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	sianmink 2009-06-09 03:29 am UTC (link)
	'killed off' about as well as you could do for an X-man. No body, and she's been 'ghosted' before and shown she can survive an extended time in that state. Personally I'm hoping Galactus catches the bullet, finds her and thinks, oh, Kitty. Delightful girl, and sharp too. I'll just fix her up and send her home. (Reply to this) (Parent)

uadlika
2009-06-08 11:11 am UTC (link)

My friend who is a huge Whedon fan told me that I should check out Astonishing X-Men. It was my first foray into Marvel comics (besides that trade of Eternals I got because of Gaiman), and after reading the first trade I ordered them all. Damn enablers.

Maybe it's because I didn't really know anything about Kitty or Piotr or the X-Men beyond what I half remembered from the movies added to the fact that I'm not a huge Whedon fan and therefore don't know his work that well, but I enjoyed this run (especially Logan's regression into a wee 19th century lad). I got to love Kitty and Piotr, and then got my heart broken for Piotr as she merged with a giant space bullet in a moment of wtfery and heroics.

I'm now going back and rereading some of Kitty and Piotr's (though not necessarily together) earlier stories. Any suggestions from Ellis' run that show her as more mature? I'm interested to see the difference.

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angelophile
2009-06-08 11:23 am UTC (link)

Pretty much anything from Ellis' Excalibur run, especially from #86 onwards, spotlights Kitty well. If you get get hold of it, the Pryde and Wisdom miniseries too, which is just full of love and Kitty and Pete Wisdom bouncing witty dialogue off each other while staying true to character (unlike Whedon's humor, which tends to rely on characters saying or doing something entirely out of place for lols).

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	majingojira 2009-06-09 12:08 am UTC (link)
	Which is really funny since he once stated (Somewhere) that he basically based Buffy's personality partly on Kitty. Other writers have stated that they wrote Faith as if they were writting Elektra. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	timemonkey 2009-06-09 06:38 pm UTC (link)
	Not surprising she read that way considering I've heard he based Buffy off of Kitty so his takes on the characters should be mostly the same. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	greenmask 2009-06-08 09:26 am UTC (link)
	I absolutely agree, about X-Men: Return to Sunnydale. I stopped buying it for that reason! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	bluefall 2009-06-08 09:59 am UTC (link)
	This right here is actually a perfect example of that. Sex for the heroine immediately prior to noble sacrifice death. That just feels supremely Buffyverse. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	schmevil 2009-06-08 03:21 pm UTC (link)
	Completely agree. (Reply to this) (Parent)

icon_uk
2009-06-08 06:40 am UTC (link)

I don't think I've ever seen a more blatant, or literal, piece of fanwank than Whedon's colliding of Kitty and Piotr.

THEY'D BROKEN UP TWENTY YEARS AGO, and had never been a couple even then other than a holding hands, swearing affection, actually rather creepy "Why is that 19 year old dating someone he knows is 15 tops?" way.

Give me the adult, grown up, Warren Ellis written Kitty who told Piotr to essentially, grow up, grow a pair, and she was quite happily having mutually enjoyable sex with Wisdom thank you very much.

This, this was just... not good.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	angelophile 2009-06-08 07:02 am UTC (link)
	So much motto. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

kirayoshi1
2009-06-08 11:43 am UTC (link)

I have my own issues with Warren Ellis' run on Excalibur. I liked how he wrote Kitty, and Pete Wisdom is a cool character when written well(ie, not written by Ben Raab!) but I never liked them as a couple. I have the same problem with Buffy and Spike. That's just my bugaboo, I'm not flaming anyone.

What I really hated was his mishandling of Colossus. Given that in Piotr's most recent appearance prior to his stint on Excalibur(UXM #325) he wasn't even thinking of Kitty. He knew he had made mistakes during his time with Magneto's Acolytes, and wanted to atone for them. Had Ellis read that issue before writing him into Excalibur, I don't believe that he would have written him as an unthinking brute, attacking Wisdom for daring to lay hands on "his Katya".

In later issues, Ellis wrote Piotr as the thoughtful, kind-hearted, gentle giant we all know and love from Claremont's run, making it hard to reconcile that treatment with the way Ellis wrote him when he first joined the team.

"Them's my beliefs, amen, so be it." --Long John Silver, "Treasure Island"

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angelophile
2009-06-08 12:52 pm UTC (link)

Oh, I do agree that Piotr's initial appearance in Excalibur was... well, I'm not sure about out of character, so much as jarring. He was clearly a guy suffering from severe psychological problems and anger management issues, but that had been true from before Illyana's death (when she died the one memory I have is him raging at the other X-men for leaving her side before he realizes she's died) and his joining the Acolytes. The way I viewed it was that Piotr had been building and building to that breaking point and it finally came at that moment - emotion, lack of sleep, all these things contributing to his final breakdown which came in the form of anger, not untrue to form (this is the guy who jerked Kitty around and then got into an angry fight with Juggernaut because Kurt and Logan called him on it, remember).

In a way I almost think he needed that violent snap to bring him to his senses and from then on, as you say, he started to return to his former self. But it wasn't just Wisdom keeping Piotr and Kitty apart - it was that they'd grown apart many years before. They were close as friends, but the snapping moment showed the worse of what they could be like as a couple. That's why this return to a Piotr and Kitty romantic relationship seemed forced and unnatural to me.

It's a shame that Fraction seems to have taken Piotr back to a similar mindset he had when he broke down before, his obsession with Kitty isn't so much touching as creepy in his run, in my opinion.

I like them much more apart than together.

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	trueredorion 2009-06-08 05:17 pm UTC (link)
	I find it strange you don't Kitty/Wisdom creepy since she couldn't have been more then 16 when they were screwing like rabbits. During Claremont's Excalibur run she celebrated her 15th birthday meaning she was underage when she started sleeping with Ellis' preferred stock character. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

icon_uk
2009-06-08 05:31 pm UTC (link)

Nope, Warren Ellis has gone on record that as far he was concerned, and he WAS the sole writer of the character at the time, by the time Kitty was in HIS Excalibur she was 18 or 19, and more than capable of choosing her bedroom partner.

I believe Claremont de-aged her again when he resumed writing her, but that was HIS problem, never Ellis'

Given the fluid nature of comic time, you cannot cite a birthday in a comic written something four years previously by another writer as proof of age of a comic character. she could easily have had multiple birthdays between times.

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	xlineartx 2009-06-08 03:52 am UTC (link)
	I miss Kitty so much. (Reply to this)

filkertom
2009-06-08 05:47 am UTC (link)

in a desperate effort to prevent the Breakworld tyrant from destroying the Earth with a ten-mile-long hollow-tipped bullet(I wish to God I wasn't kidding).

Wh- Joss wasn't satisfied with his impale-the-innocent fetish, he had to try to impale the entire fucking Earth!?

(And, echoing the Bring Kitty Back. She should never have died in the first place. Example #46,382 of If You Don't Like Or Don't Know What To Do With The Character, Don't Kill The Character Off.)

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	angelophile 2009-06-08 06:03 am UTC (link)
	The thing is, it wasn't a case of Whedon not knowing what to do with her, since he was leaving the book anyway, just a case of his apparent taste for killing off characters he likes for supposed emotional impact. Just needless drama for the sake of drama. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

brilliantnova
2009-06-08 06:21 am UTC (link)

( Have not read X-men in a while, only when I'm in a bookstore I'll scan through them on my lunch breaks )

To add to your comment, it was a real shame cause it seems like they been trying to replace The young woman part with vapid personalities.
Hey since Kitty out of the book lets use Armor or whataver her name was. Then hey lets Use Pixie and make her develop a 25 year old body and have her act completely out of character.

I have no problem with Pixie. I actually thought she was cute in the Young X-Men books. But she became this vapid cheesecake for the main X-Men books and that was a real turnoff.
I almost wish they had recruited snarky arsed Julian instead. There would have been less cheesecake, but eh I think he would have made an excellent young protege to add to the team.

For what they did to Pixie, they should have written Kitty back into the books. that way they could have used her for cheesecake shots and perhaps she may have been written with half of the personality that Pixie displayed. :[

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	sianmink 2009-06-09 03:33 am UTC (link)
	granted at least half of Pixie's problem is that Greg Land can't trace loli porn and has to use the normal porn instead. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	filkertom 2009-06-08 03:05 pm UTC (link)
	Man, that's the worst. I mean, I can almost understand it, if it's your own creation -- but Kitty? Just because he wanted to? That reeks. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	sandoz_iscariot 2009-06-08 07:21 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, it says a lot that his way of leaving a mark on the character who had influenced his most popular creation was to kill her. But then, I have issues with Joss. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	majingojira 2009-06-09 12:10 am UTC (link)
	And here we are, several years later, and look--we're still talking about it! It's one of the unifying truths of media: Ya gotta kill your babies. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

angelophile
2009-06-09 02:43 am UTC (link)

It's not several years, it's, what, about one? And the thing is, Kitty wasn't his baby. Although he based Buffy on Kitty so somehow that seems to suggest some form of ownership of the original character perhaps.
I've always considered Whedon with Kitty the same as Quesada with Peter Parker. Both wanted the characters to go back to how they remembered reading them, even if it made no sense for them to jump back to twenty year old characterization, they did it anyway. Whedon was just a bit more literal about destroying the character when he was done.

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	volksjager 2009-06-08 07:05 am UTC (link)
	God that is a good scene. (Reply to this)

	menagerie 2009-06-08 09:13 am UTC (link)
	What I want to see? Rachel Summers joins the Guardians of the Galaxy after the whole War of the King thing. Then, they find Kitty who also joins up. It'd be great! (Reply to this) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-06-08 09:19 am UTC (link)
	You know, that so would be great. Though there's a part of me which, given that Quasar was a female for a while, wants to see a bit of tat-for-tit and the return (albeit a millenium early) of the He-oenix! :) (Reply to this) (Parent)

angelophile
2009-06-08 04:35 pm UTC (link)

Yes, I've said since the giant space bullet happened and talk of Kurt quitting the X-men went round that Marvel really really need to do a book where Kurt heads off into space, joins up with Rachel and the Starjammers, thereby becoming a space pirate and together they perform a daring rescue, rescuing Kitty before Kurt sexes up Hepzibah in celebration and Rachel and Kitty... well, anyway, Marvel need to make that happen.

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	sianmink 2009-06-09 03:35 am UTC (link)
	Gawd yes Motto. Bring the Rachel/Kitty/Kurt team back! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	greenmask 2009-06-08 09:28 am UTC (link)
	:[ :[ I am sad that you did not mean they had actually been tap-dancing. As in, just back from a lesson. I really thought you did for a second! (Reply to this)